ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce of Chalon-sur-Saône, France, succeeded in developing a primitive form of the photographic process by exposing a bitumen-coated pewter plate to direct sunlight (Rosenblum, 1984:194); it took eight hours for the plate to record the indistinct image of a dovecote on Niepce’s estate. Niepce was joined in his efforts by Louis Mandé Daguerre, a one-time painter of stage sets and owner of a Diorama.1 Daguerre continued to work on the problem following Niepce’s death in 1833, and in 1837 he managed to finally arrest the action of light by inserting the silver halides plates in a bath of silver chloride.
